Last week I mentioned UW-Madison Professor Cronon's seeming harassment by the state's Republican party. Today, UW-Madison announced it would comply with the request . . . with, of course, some caveats:

We are excluding records involving students because they are protected under FERPA. We are excluding exchanges that fall outside the realm of the ( Read more... )

By now, you've probably heard about the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a group founded in 1973 that helps conservative legislators with pre-drafted legislation they can handily introduce into their houses and senates. It seems ALEC drafted the anti-collective bargaining bills in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, and had a hand in the ( Read more... )

By now, everyone has heard about what is happening seemingly all at once in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. Republican governors are trying to ram "emergency" legislation through their senates and houses that would strip the most robust union demographic, public employees, of their collective bargaining rights ( Read more... )

I'm not one to harp in endless postings about the political and the current, but this Tuscon shooting and the froth and blather it has prompted is lacking, as far as I can tell, in one telling literary parallel. So far, no one in the mainstream media has compared Jarod Loughner to Lord Exton from William Shakespeare's Richard II.

( Oh, damn it, not a Shakespeare post! What has he got to do with those of us who speak English?!? )

One of the most underrated Heinlein novels, Podkayne of Mars, had a brief interaction with a character that perfectly described the role of politicians. They talk and talk, yes, but that's their job: when people stop talking to each other, they start shooting ( Read more... )

In my very early twenties -- the first year, in fact -- I was (as they say in the vernacular) shooting the shit with a friend over cheap beers. (Muscles, if you're curious, bleaknemesis, and near the Sprinker Rock.) My friend had made a tired joke. Though I try to avoid tired jokes myself, it was giddy enough or late enough or I had consumed beers enough to ( Read more... )

The comic? The watermelon smashing guy who liked props? Ever wonder what happened to him?

The answer might not amuse you at all. He's become a right-wing nut job. An angry, racist, homophobic, hate-spewing asshole, from the look of it. Check out this review of a recent live show -- and I apologize in advance about his words, but they must be ( Read more... )

Just finished Douglas Rushkoff's Life, Inc., a book that chronicles the rise of the corporation over the last few centuries. According to Rushkoff, small businesses were garnering way too much economic power near the end of the "Dark" Ages (actually a very good time to be a peasant, but that's another story) from the established royalty. To ( Read more... )

Jonathon Haidt gives the best explanation I've heard yet for the differences between us.

The December 4 episode of On The Media got me in a huff, yet again. They interviewed another media/newspaper professional. He spoke of "progress" developing a revenue stream for news in an era of collapsing papers. And he focused again on financial dogma dredged from the turn of the last century; revenue from advertisements and subscriptions ( Read more... )